Douglas Engelbart, a technology pioneer best known for his invention of the computer mouse, died in Atherton, California on Wednesday. He was 88 years old. Engelbart began working at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI International) in 1957, and there, according to John Markoff's obituary in The New York Times, he began trying to make the computer screen "a workstation that would organize all the information and communications for a given project." It's a concept we take for granted today. But it was considered far-fetched back then. A decade later, Engelbart brought us all into the world of interactive computing and graphic interfaces when, in 1968, he presented what's now called "The Mother of All Demos." You can watch it in its entirety above. Stanford's MouseSite sets the stage for what you're going to see:

On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.

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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.